Raspberry Pi: Making DIY computing cool again

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When it comes to the types of products and stories I cover, I’m rarely the most popular guy in the office. When Apple released all its new MacBooks several weeks ago, we had marketing folks streaming into the lab to get a glimpse. The CEO reportedly came by to try out the Windows 8 touchscreen PC we had set up. And it probably goes without saying that the phone, tablet, and camera guys around here get a lot more love than I do. Sadly, video cards, solid-state drives, motherboards, CPUs, and the like are all seen as too geeky, too user-unfriendly for the masses of my colleagues, so they usually leave me alone until some rare news happening forces them to remember I exist for a few hours.

All that changed one day last week, and I have the Raspberry Pi to thank for it.

ExtremeTech has written about the Raspberry Pi a number of times before, so I realize that I’m not exactly breaking a ton of new ground talking about it here. But this was the first time we had actually gotten one of the coveted things inside the New York office. And as soon as people heard about it, they came streaming from all over to see it in action. They would not stop peppering me with questions about it. And I was shocked to walk away from my desk for 45 seconds or so only to have to return and have to fight through a throng of people crowded around the setup, oohing and ahhing at whatever was on the screen.

The experience felt great — and not just because the kinds of things I care about were finally getting noticed.

What mattered much more to me than the attention was the fact that these people were, for the first time in ages (if not ever), confronting a computer in its most elemental form. The Raspberry Pi Model B is nothing but a credit card–size slab of circuit board with a few chips, a few ports, a few headers, and no pretentions whatsoever. For $35, you get the absolute basic necessities to make a computer that will turn on, run some optimized form of Linux, and maybe get on the internet. (If you don’t care about out-of-the-box networking capability, you can order the $25 Model A instead.) But you have to guide the Raspberry Pi every step of the way, from making a boot disk on an SD card to configuring the OS (via the command line, no less!) to wiring any additional components or add-ons yourself. If you don’t know your stuff, or if you can’t prove it, you’ll just have to stare dumbfounded at the screen.

I’m going to stop short of saying that this is how computing should be — there’s a lot to be said for attracting a broad userbase — and instead merely express my enthusiastic approval for the fact that this option now exists.

If you’ve been reading my writing around here for the last few years, you know that one of my “causes” has been a call for deeper technology awareness in the K-12 set. When I was growing up at the same time the home PC industry was, there were no fancy graphical interfaces, pop-up windows, or digitized voices to help you make sense of what you were doing. (Heck, you were lucky if there were more than eight colors on the screen at the same time.) If you wanted to do anything, you had to be willing to take chances and make mistakes and try new things, and you had to know where you could find help if you couldn’t figure out something yourself.

Computers weren’t really any harder to use then than they are now, but they were an unexplored frontier, and you couldn’t separate how they worked from how you used them. Learning one meant learning the other, and that fostered an understanding of the technology, an appreciation for logic and problem solving, and, when multiple people interested in the stuff came together, a sense of community unlike any I’ve ever felt since. It all inspired a generation of brilliant, curious people to create the amazing world in which we now live, and I’ve been worried for a while that the paint-by-numbers, disposable approach to design meant that such an environment could never, ever be created again.

Now that the Raspberry Pi is here, maybe my prediction was premature. It’s astoundingly popular, well beyond what I had dared dream about. And it’s making everyone look at the industry and its assumptions in a way they haven’t bothered to for a while. Whereas some companies like, say, Apple, have made a mint by closing people off from the technology they own, this is one that actually opens up new vistas, and can thus remind people how wonderful that can be. The Raspberry Pi website is full of wild and wonderful applications of the thing, from cameras to voice-controlled robots to ladder games and way too many others to get into here. And, of course, if you only care about using it as a computer, you can do that, too. In that case, it’s going to be pretty slow, I have to warn you. (Our cellphone guy described its speed as being about on par with that of a smartphone from 2007.) But what do you expect for less than $40? And given all the other possibilities at your disposal, is that really that bad?

Not in my book. The Raspberry Pi is computing potential in its rawest and most exciting form, something even those of us who immerse ourselves in this world haven’t witnessed for the better part of two decades — or maybe longer. It was created as an educational tool, to remind kids that a lot more happens inside a computer than you may necessarily remember — and that it deserves your respect. And because of the Raspberry Pi (and the products that are being developed to compete with it, like the VIA APC 8750, there’s a good chance that a new generation of computer users might be driven to take greater control over what they do and how they do it. When that happens, companies will naturally have to become less restrictive and hold less power than they have for a while — and consumers will only benefit from that.

Yes, I know that the Raspberry Pi can’t turn the tide by itself, but it can help people take those vital first few steps. And from there, who’s to say where they might end up going? I, for one, can’t wait to find out — and I can’t wait to get back to playing with the Raspberry Pi myself. Assuming I can fight off my coworkers long enough to get to it, that is. But if it can get them jazzed about something most of them usually shun, it seems safe to say that there’s nothing it can’t do.

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